Chaos to Order

The last few days have been a blur of provisioning and running back and forth to the boat.  We made the last runs of stuff out to the boat on Saturday.  For the last run we had our son come out with us and then drive our car home.  It felt a little weird watching our car being driven away, and being left without any car at the marina.

Canada Day video

This is my first foray into video production with the new GoPro camera.  I ran it for a few hours on Canada Day, doing 30 second time lapse capture.  I think it turned out kind of neat.  I wanted an iconic Canada Day song to accompany it, and I think Stompin' Tom is about as much a Canadian icon as there is, and his "Canada Day, up Canada Way" song was just the ticket.

A new house bank

I had mentioned in a previous post our 'ailing house bank'.  While it was accepting and holding a charge just fine, its capacity was down substantially. The house bank on a cruising boat is very important, because when you're not hooked up to shore power it's the house bank that powers everything on the boat.

Our fifteen minutes?

On Tuesday morning, shortly after we had moved the boat from the west wall of the Ottawa lock canal over to the east wall, a man with a honking big and expensive looking camera came up to the boat and introduced himself as Bruce Deachman from the Ottawa Citizen newspaper.  He explained that he was doing a series of articles about life in Ottawa during the summer and asked if he could do one about us.  We invited him on board and had a nice chat for about an hour.

Well, it seems that the Citizen has found our story worthy of ink and has published his article about us.  I haven't picked up a paper copy of the newspaper yet, so I'm not sure what page we ended up on, but I did spot the spike in traffic to the blog and followed it back to the online page for the article;

Days of Summer, Day 15: A slow boat to paradise

So there you go, our fifteen minutes of fame, and thankfully, it wasn't in the crime section! :-)

A short pause

Another trip to Ottawa for Canada Day is now in the books.  We're home now for a few days with some boat and house projects to take care of before we head out sometime next week.

A down-day in Ottawa (2013-07-02)

As we did last year, we chose to spend another day in Ottawa on the wall and not deal with the crowd of boats rushing for the locks.

We waited for some of the boats to leave, then we moved over to the east wall where we could tie up to a dock instead of a railing.  We also hooked up to shore power so we could give our ailing house batteries a boost.

We had a nice quiet 'down day'.  We did some sight seeing, a bit of shopping and went out for lunch.  Tomorrow we'll begin the trip back up the river to our marina, but we'll probably make a two day trip out of it, just because we can. :-)

Canada Day in Ottawa (2013-07-01)

Another Canada Day, and another year of patriotic red and white.  Words can't even do justice to the number of people that were downtown this year, so I'll let this picture do the talking;

A panorama of chaos... :-)